United Arab Emirates

One of the remarkable characteristics of the drug lexicon is its elusive nature. In order to communicate information related to drugs or drug trafficking, the community uses several terms that are mostly unknown to regular people, or even to the authorities. For instance, the terms jolly green, joystick, or jive are used to refer to marijuana. The selection of such terms is not necessarily a random or senseless process, but a communicative strategy in which figurative language plays a relevant role. In this study, we describe an ongoing research to identify drug-related terms by applying machine learning techniques. To this end, a data set regarding drug trafficking in Spanish was built. This data set was used to train a word embedding model to identify terms used by the community to creatively refer to drugs and related matters. The initial findings show an interesting repository of terms created to consciously veil drug-related contents by using figurative language devices, such as metaphor or metonymy. These findings can provide preliminary evidence to be applied by law agencies in order to address actions against crime, drug transactions on the internet, illicit activities, or human trafficking.

EMNLP 2022

An insulin pump? Identifying figurative links in the construction of the drug lexicon

drug trafficking

implicit language

figurative language

workshop paper

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

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EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

This paper describes our submissions to the EMNLP 2022 shared task on Understanding Figurative Language as part of the Figurative Language Workshop (FigLang 2022). Our systems based on pre-trained language model T5 are divide-and-conquer models which can address both two requirements of the task: 1) classification, and 2) generation. In this paper, we introduce different approaches in which each approach we employ a processing strategy on input model. We also emphasize the influence of the types of figurative language on our systems.

NLP@UIT at FigLang-EMNLP 2022: A Divide-and-Conquer System For Shared Task On Understanding Figurative Language

This work builds upon the Euphemism Detection Shared Task proposed in the EMNLP 2022 FigLang Workshop, and extends it to few-shot and zero-shot settings. We demonstrate a few-shot and zero-shot formulation using the dataset from the shared task, and we conduct experiments in these settings using RoBERTa and GPT-3. Our results show that language models are able to classify euphemistic terms relatively well even on new terms unseen during training, indicating that it is able to capture higher-level concepts related to euphemisms.

Exploring Euphemism Detection in Few-Shot and Zero-Shot Settings

We present the results of the Shared Task on Understanding Figurative Language that we conducted as a part of the 3rd Workshop on Figurative Language Processing (FigLang 2022) at EMNLP 2022. The shared task is based on the FLUTE dataset (Chakrabarty et al., 2022), which consists of NLI pairs containing figurative language along with free text explanations for each NLI instance. The task challenged participants to build models that are able to not only predict the right label for a figurative NLI instance, but also generate a convincing free-text explanation. The participants were able to significantly improve upon provided baselines in both automatic and human evaluation settings. We further summarize the submitted systems and discuss the evaluation results.

A Report on the FigLang 2022 Shared Task on Understanding Figurative Language

Neural language models encode rich knowledge about entities and their relationships which can be extracted from their representations using probing. Common properties of nouns (e.g., red strawberries, small ant) are, however, more challenging to extract compared to other types of knowledge because they are rarely explicitly stated in texts. We hypothesize this to mainly be the case for perceptual properties which are obvious to the participants in the communication. We propose to extract these properties from images and use them in an ensemble model, in order to complement the information that is extracted from language models. We consider perceptual properties to be more concrete than abstract properties (e.g., interesting, flawless). We propose to use the adjectives' concreteness score as a lever to calibrate the contribution of each source (text vs. images). We evaluate our ensemble model in a ranking task where the actual properties of a noun need to be ranked higher than other non-relevant properties. Our results show that the proposed combination of text and images greatly improves noun property prediction compared to powerful text-based language models.

Visualizing the Obvious: A Concreteness-based Ensemble Model for Noun Property Prediction

We propose a unified framework to generate both homophonic and homographic puns to resolve the split-up in existing works. Specifically, we incorporate three linguistic attributes of puns to the language models: ambiguity, distinctiveness, and surprise. Our framework consists of three parts: 1) a context words/phrases selector to promote the aforementioned attributes, 2) a generation model trained on non-pun sentences to incorporate the context words/phrases into the generation output, and 3) a label predictor that learns the structure of puns which is used to steer the generation model at inference time. 
Evaluation results on both pun types demonstrate the efficacy of our model over strong baselines.

A Unified Framework for Pun Generation with Humor Principles

Levin et al. (2019) show experimentally that the interpretations of novel English noun compounds (e.g., stew skillet), while not fully compositional, are highly predictable based on whether the modifier and head refer to artifacts or natural kinds. Is the large language model GPT-3 governed by the same interpretive principles? To address this question, we first compare Levin et al.'s experimental data with GPT-3 generations, finding a high degree of similarity. However, this evidence is consistent with GPT-3 reasoning only about specific lexical items rather than the more abstract conceptual categories of Levin et al.'s theory. To probe more deeply, we construct prompts that require the relevant kind of conceptual reasoning. Here, we fail to find convincing evidence that GPT-3 is reasoning about more than just individual lexical items. These results highlight the importance of controlling for low-level distributional regularities when assessing whether a large language model latently encodes a deeper theory.

Systematicity in GPT-3's Interpretation of Novel English Noun Compounds

This paper examines the encoding of analogy in large-scale pretrained language models, such as BERT and GPT-2. Existing analogy datasets typically focus on a limited set of analogical relations, with a high similarity of the two domains between which the analogy holds. As a more realistic setup, we introduce the Scientific and Creative Analogy dataset (SCAN), a novel analogy dataset containing systematic mappings of multiple attributes and relational structures across dissimilar domains. Using this dataset, we test the analogical reasoning capabilities of several widely-used pretrained language models (LMs). We find that state-of-the-art LMs achieve low performance on these complex analogy tasks, highlighting the challenges still posed by analogy understanding.

Scientific and Creative Analogies in Pretrained Language Models

Humor is an inherently social phenomenon, with humorous utterances shaped by what is socially and culturally accepted. Understanding humor is an important NLP challenge, with many applications to human-computer interactions. In this work we explore humor in the context of Cards Against Humanity -- a party game where players complete fill-in-the-blank statements using cards that can be offensive or politically incorrect.

We introduce a novel dataset of 300,000 online games of Cards Against Humanity, including 785K unique jokes, analyze it and provide insights. We trained machine learning models to predict the winning joke per game, achieving performance twice as good (20%) as random, even without any user information.
On the more difficult task of judging novel cards, we see the models' ability to generalize is moderate. Interestingly, we find that our models are primarily focused on punchline card, with the context having little impact.
Analyzing feature importance, we observe that short, crude, juvenile punchlines tend to win.

Cards Against AI: Predicting Humor in a Fill-in-the-blank Party Game

How language models process complex input that requires multiple steps of inference is not well understood. Previous research has shown that information about intermediate values of these inputs can be extracted from the activations of the models, but it is unclear where that information is encoded and whether that information is indeed used during inference. We introduce a method for analyzing how a Transformer model processes these inputs by focusing on simple arithmetic problems and their intermediate values. To trace where information about intermediate values is encoded, we measure the correlation between intermediate values and the activations of the model using principal component analysis (PCA). Then, we perform a causal intervention by manipulating model weights.  This intervention shows that the weights identified via tracing are not merely correlated with intermediate values, but causally related to model predictions. Our findings show that the model has a locality to certain intermediate values, and this is useful for enhancing the interpretability of the models.

Tracing and Manipulating intermediate values in Neural Math Problem Solvers

In this paper, we revisit math word problems~(MWPs) from the cross-lingual and multilingual perspective. We construct our MWP solvers over pretrained multilingual language models using the sequence-to-sequence model with copy mechanism. We compare how the MWP solvers perform in cross-lingual and multilingual scenarios. To facilitate the comparison of cross-lingual performance, we first adapt the large-scale English dataset MathQA as a counterpart of the Chinese dataset Math23K. Then we extend several English datasets to bilingual datasets through machine translation plus human annotation. Our experiments show that the MWP solvers may not be transferred to a different language even if the target expressions share the same numerical constants and operator set. However, it can be better generalized if problem types exist on both source language and target language.

An insulin pump? Identifying figurative links in the construction of the drug lexicon

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NLP@UIT at FigLang-EMNLP 2022: A Divide-and-Conquer System For Shared Task On Understanding Figurative Language

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